‘Black Sails’ is not your family pirates show

BLACK SAILS

When: 9 p.m. Saturday.

Where: Starz.

Starz’s new big-budget series “Black Sails” is hardly a pirate story inspired by a family-oriented theme-park ride. Instead, these are men and women living on the edge of the world in 1715 during the end of the Golden Age of Piracy — and on the edge in everything else they do.

In the first episode alone, the beautiful and powerful Eleanor Guthrie, played by Hannah New, proves she can be as vulgar as any buccaneer, give and take a punch, and shows — as far as her sex life is concerned — that the door swings both ways.

“It’s a world where sexuality and boundaries have been completely broken down,” the British actress says. “So to play a young woman who doesn’t have those kind of social restrictions put on her, who is free to use her sexuality in whichever way is advantageous to her, is fabulous.”

Producer Jonathan E. Steinberg, who created the series with mega-filmmaker Michael Bay, says he always saw tales of pirates as more akin to a Western, with people trying to carve out a life and make a fortune as civilization closes in.

“It’s a frontier story,” Steinberg says about “Black Sails.” “It’s a story about necessity, day-to-day survival, breaking down social convention.”

If “Black Sails” is out to “dispel myths we have about piracy,” as New says, it’s doing it on an ambitious scale. Bay’s production company is shooting the series on a giant set near Cape Town, South Africa, to re-create the Caribbean of that era. The facility includes two giant water tanks, a beach, two ships, an entire downtown and a cast of about a thousand extras.

Due to the overwhelming positive response given the series at a presentation at last summer’s Comic-Con in San Diego, it has already been renewed for a second season. (This season has eight episodes, while production on the 10-episode second season began in November.)

The story draws on fact as well as fiction in that it is something of a prequel to the most classic of all pirate stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel, “Treasure Island,” set in the mid-1700s.

“Black Sails” is set more than 20 years earlier. Toby Stephens plays Captain Flint, a character described in the novel as someone who carried “a great weight of terror.” Then there is a young John Silver (Luke Arnold), who still has both his legs, and Billy Bones (Tom Hopper), who is an old drunkard in “Treasure Island.”

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Some of the characters are based on real people: Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) is believed to have designed the Jolly Roger flag, a skull with crossed swords; Capt. Charles Vane (Zach McGowan) was known for his cruelty toward the crews of captured vessels; and Anne Bonny (Clara Paget) was known to fight on pirate ships.

While New’s Eleanor is fiction, the actress — who played a British spy in a Spanish miniseries — says the best thing about her job is “being able to delve into history and become totally immersed in it,” but admits it wasn’t easy in this case, “because there wasn’t a huge amount written about women at this time in the Bahamas.”

One of her inspirations, though, was Grace O’Malley, sometimes called the Pirate Queen, a 16th-century Irish aristocrat who inherited a shipping fortune and is believed to have allowed piracy among her men.

Eleanor wields the same sort of power. As the daughter of Richard Guthrie (Sean Cameron Michael), the wealthiest black marketer in the Bahamas, Eleanor oversees his dealings with the pirates in Nassau; she also operates the town’s tavern and brothel.

Still, what would a pirate story be without a search for a treasure? Flint, who is facing a challenge to his captaincy, and Eleanor forge an alliance to fight encroaching tentacles of British power.

“There’s a dirty little real-life backstory that changes the whole pirate dynamic,” Stephens says. “Until shortly before this story starts, these privateers had almost worked with the British navy. Now, suddenly, they are being treated as criminals.”

True, the British — from the time of Queen Elizabeth I — often turned a blind eye toward buccaneering as long as it interrupted Spanish or French trade, but the end of colonial wars had left many sailors unemployed and looking for a way to make a living.

Stephens, who has concentrated on stage work throughout most of his career, is the son of two great British thespians, the late Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, a longtime star who is currently playing the Dowager Countess on the British period drama “Downton Abbey.”

“I appreciate what my mum does in it,” Stephens says. “She’s great in it. But it’s just not really what I enjoy watching.”

Stephens prefers pirate adventures.

“Playing this kind of thing, for me, is like going on an exotic vacation because we just don’t do this kind of stuff in the U.K.,” he says. The series has “a fantastic character, phenomenal production values, and a fantastic story. And that’s what I want to be involved in.”

What’s important for Stephens is that the audience get past the pirate outfits and see the characters as “real people in real situations that you can identify with.” His Captain Flint is something of a mystery at first, but Stephens notes that a cable television series allows time to develop characters in depth. .

Steinberg says the aim of the series is to show what it would be like in a world where “the absence of any kind of authority had meaning. And I think that means violence. And so when things get violent, I think we wanted to make it feel shocking.”

And there is sex.

“I think we wanted to make sure that it feels real,” he says. “People have sex, and they almost certainly have sex in a world in which none of them really have any jobs, and they are living in the Caribbean.”

But if “Black Sails” delivers all the sex and violence expected on a pay-cable network, it also clearly has a serious story to tell, with intrigue and drama, and is a series that Starz is willing to take time to develop.

New says the series is about self-made men and questions the idea of heroes and villains.

“All these characters are put in situations where they have to question their own morals,” says the actress, who will be seen in Disney’s summer release “Maleficent” —­ a take on the “Sleeping Beauty” story starring Angelina Jolie — as the mother of young Princess Aurora.

But since she shot that role, she has been living in what she calls a “little bubble of fantastic sets” for a year in South Africa shooting “Black Sails.” So far, though, they have yet to write her a scene in which she gets to use a sword. “I am dying to get some weaponry,” she says.